Wednesday, December 31, 2014

I haven’t had the heart to put something in my blog since
the elections. As Paul Krugman succinctly put it, the US elected a Congress
that does not believe in climate change and will try to prevent anything being
done about it. Given the power of
Congress to obstruct, that is a very bad sign for doing anything meaningful
about climate change for the next few years – and that, to me, overshadows
anything else that happened this year.

Still, I would like to take note of a few other things worth
thinking about that happened this year.
In climate change, commentary on the issue in some print venues and some
radio outlets, not to mention the cable-channel special Years of Living Dangerously,
actually began to represent the facts of climate change and to treat them in a
more serious manner.

In computing, it seems to me that there was a bit of a
technology-advancement slowdown this year.
Much of the impetus of the year was in things already pretty much in the
works, like further exploration of hybrid clouds, wider application of IBM’s
Watson, and the next generation of touch-screen smartphones and tablets. I hope to do some searching for something,
anything really new and potentially valuable come the New Year – yes, it’s a
New Year’s Resolution.

If I had to give an epitaph for 2014, I would call it the
year when people refused to admit that there were times when the needs of the
future trump the needs of the present.
Playing games yet again with the full faith and credit of the US by
holding the debt ceiling limit hostage to letting banks play games again with
derivatives; cementing climate-change denial in our governance; attempts to
stifle scientists in the US, Canada, and probably Australia, the so-called “free-speech
democracies”; the EU shutting its ears to criticisms of austerity policies;
Putin and his belief in realpolitik; Netanyahu and Israel’s onward push into
what John Le Carre aptly called a “grubby little Spartan state”; the list goes
on and on.

One of Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker books was called So Long
and Thanks for All the Fish – in which the dolphins decide they’ve had enough
of suckering stupid humans into giving them free fish and leave this Earth,
leaving behind that message. I doubt
very much we will get thanks from future generations of humans for 2014’s
accomplishments, nor from the animals or fish who are already bearing the brunt
of them, as evidenced by the accelerated rate of species extinction and the
increased acidification and fertilizer pollution of the oceans. Hence:
So long 2014, and no thanks from all the fish.

In a Barney Miller TV series episode, the Hasidim and
African-Americans of Brooklyn get into a spat, and after it’s over the local
rabbi drops by for a chat. Maybe it’ll
turn out to all be for the best, the rabbi says. Maybe, says Barney, but I sincerely doubt
it. That’s good, says the rabbi: too much hope makes you crazy. I hope I can be more cheerful about
2015. So far, looking ahead, I sincerely
doubt it.

Wayne Kernochan

About Me

I have recently retired. Before retirement, I was a long-time computer industry analyst at firms like Aberdeen Group and Yankee Group, and before that a programmer at Prime Computer and Computer Corp. of America. Sloan/MIT MBA, Cornell Computer Science Master's, and Harvard college degrees. Used to play the violin, and have written unpublished books about personal finance, violin playing, and the relationship between religion and mathematics, as well as three plays, two musicals, a screenplay on climate change, short stories, and poetry. I intend to use this blog in future both to continue to enjoy the computing field and to pursue my interests in many other areas (e.g., climate change, history, issues of the day).